The American Republic: Its Dangers and Possibilities
Henry George
[A speech delivered in the California Theatre, San
Francisco, 4 July, 1877]
Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen:
IT is under circumstances that inspire gratitude and renew patriotism
that we celebrate the completion by the American Republic of the first
year of her second century. How much that year has held of the
possibilities of dire calamity it may be too soon to speak.1 But for
the deliverance let us give thanks. Through the web woven by passion
and prejudice has run the woof of a beneficent purpose. Through clash
of plans and conflict of parties; through gateways hung with cloud and
by paths we knew not of, have we come to this good estate! As, when
the long struggle was over, the men of the Revolution turned to pour
forth their thanks to Him in whose hands are the nations, so let us
turn to-day. Last year was the Centennial; but this year, if we read
the times aright, marks the era, and with 1877 will the historian, in
future ages, close the grand division of our history that records the
long, sad strife of which slavery was the cause. Most gracious of our
national anniversaries is that we keep. Never before has the great
Declaration rung through the land as to-day. For the first time have
its words neither fallen on the ears of a slave nor been flung back by
a bayonet-guarded State House!
For year after year, while they who won our independence faded away;
for year after year, while their sons grew old, and in their turn
taught us to light the altar fires of the Republic, at every recurring
anniversary of the nation's birth, the unexpressed thought of an
inherited curse that was sowing the land with dragon's teeth, checked
the pride and gave to the rejoicings of the thoughtful a sombre
background, and between thunder of gun and voice of trumpet, the black
shadow of a great wrong mocked in silence the burning words that
protested to the world the inalienable rights of man. To this there
came an end. In the deadly close of civil war, when all fierce and
wicked passions were loosed, while the earth shook with the tread of
fratricidal armies, and the heavens were red with the blaze of burning
homes, amid the groans of dying men and the cry of stricken women, the
great curse passed away. But still the shadow. Could we boast a Union
in which State Governments were maintained by extra-State force, or
glory in a republic whose forms were mocked in virtual provinces?
But all this is of the past. The long strife is over. The cancer has
been cut out. And may we not also say to-day that the wound of the
knife has healed? To-day we celebrate the nation's birth, more truly
one people than for years and years. Again in soul as in form, the
many are one. Over palmetto as over pine floats the flag that typifies
the glory of our common past, the promise of our common future-the
flag that rose above the blood-stained snow at Valley Forge, that
crossed with Washington the icy Delaware -- the flag that Marion bore,
that Paul Jones nailed to the mast, that Lafayette saluted! Over our
undivided heritage of a continent it floats to-day, with the free will
of a united people -- under its folds no slave, and in its blue no
star save that of a free and sovereign State. And, as in city and town
and hamlet, to-day, has been read once more the declaration of a
nation's birth, again, I believe me, in the hearts of their people,
has Adams signed with Jefferson and Rutledge with Livingston, pledging
to the Republic one and indivisible, life and fortune and sacred
honour!
Beside me on this platform, around me in this audience, sit men who
have borne arms against each other in civil strife, again united under
the folds of that flag. Men of the South and men of the North, do I
not speak what is in your hearts, do I not give voice to your hope and
your trust, when I say that the Union is again restored in spirit as
in form -- not a union of conquerors and conquered, but the union of a
people -- one in soul as one in blood; one in destiny as one in
heritage!
Let our dead strifes bury their dead, while we cherish the feeling
that makes us one. Let us spare no myrrh nor frankincense nor costly
spices as we feed the sacred fire. It is not a vain thing these flags,
these decorations, these miles of marching men. Stronger than armies,
more potent than treasure is the sentiment of nationality they typify
and inculcate!
Yet to more than the sentiment of nationality is this day sacred. It
marks more than the birth of a nation -- it marks a step in the
progress of the race. More than national independence, more than
national union, speaks out in that grand document to which we have
just listened; it is the declaration of the fundamental principle of
liberty -- of a truth that has in it power to renovate the world.
It is meet that on this day the flags of all nations should mingle
above our processions and wreathe our halls. For this is the festival
of her to whom under all skies eyes have turned and hands been lifted
-- of her who has had in all lands her lovers and her martyrs -- of
her who shall yet unite the nations and bid the war drums cease! It is
the festival of Liberty!
And in keeping this day to Liberty, we honour all her sacred
days-those glorious days on which she has stepped forward, those sad
days on which she has been stricken down by open foes, or fallen
wounded in the house of her friends. Far back stretches the lineage of
the Republic at whose birth Liberty was invoked -- from every land
have been gathered the gleams of light that unite in her beacon fire.
It is kindled of the progress of mankind; it witnesses to heaven the
aspirations of the ages; it shall light the nations to yet nobler
heights!
Let us keep this day as the day sacred to Union and to Liberty should
be kept. Let us draw closer the cords of our common brotherhood and
renew our fathers' vows. Let it be honoured as John Adams predicted it
would be Honoured -- with clangour of bells and roar of guns, with
music and processions and assemblages of the people, with every mark
of respect and rejoicing -- that its memories of glory may entwine
themselves with the earliest recollections of our children, that even
the thoughtless may catch something of its inspiration!
Yet it is not enough that with all the marks of veneration we keep
these holidays. It is possible to cherish the form and lose the
spirit.
No matter how bright the lights behind, their usefulness is but to
illumine the path before. Whatever be the causes of that enormous
difference -- almost a difference in kind -- between the stationary
and the progressive races, here is its unfailing indication -- the one
look to the past, the other to the future. The moment we believe that
all wisdom was concentrated in our ancestors, that moment the
petrifaction of China is upon us. For life is growth, and growth is
change, and political progress consists in getting rid of institutions
we have outgrown. Aristocracy, feudality, monarchy, slavery -- all the
things against which human progress has been a slow and painful
struggle -- were, doubtless, in their times relatively if not
absolutely beneficial, as have been in later times things we may have
to cast away. The maxim commended to us by him who must ever remain
the greatest citizen of the Republic -- "Eternal vigilance is the
price of liberty," embodies a truth which goes to the very core
of philosophy, which must everywhere and at all times be true. Ever
and ever we sail an unknown sea. Old shapes of menace fade but to give
place to others. Even new rocks lurk; ever in new guise the syrens
sing!
As through the million-voiced plaudits of to-day we hear again the
words that when first spoken were ominous of cord and gibbet, and amid
a nation's rejoicing our pulses quicken as imagination pictures the
bridge of Lexington, the slender earthworks of Bunker Hill, the charge
of tattered Continentals, or the swift night-ride of Marion's men, let
us not think that our own times are common place, and make no call for
the patriotism that, as it wells up in our hearts, we feel would have
been strong to dare and do had we lived then.
How momentous our own times may be the future alone can tell. We are
yet laying the foundations of empire, while stronger run the currents
of change and mightier are the forces that marshal and meet.
Let us turn to the past, not in the belief that the great men of the
past conquered for us a heritage that we have but to enjoy, but that
we may catch their heroic spirit to guide and nerve us in the
exigencies of the present; that we may pass it on to our children, to
carry them through the dangers of the future.
Now, as a hundred years ago, the Republic has need of that spirit-of
the noble sensitiveness that is jealous for Freedom; of the generous
indignation that weighs our consideration of expediency against the
sacrifice of one iota of popular right; of the quick sympathy that
made an attack on the liberties of one colony felt in all; of the
patient patriotism that worked and waited, never flagging, never
tiring, seeking not recognition nor applause, looking only to the
ultimate end and to the common good; of the devotion to a high ideal
which led men to risk for it all things sweet and all things dear!
We shall best honour the men of the Revolution by invoking the spirit
that animated them; we shall best perpetuate their memories by looking
in the face whatever threatens the perpetuity of their work. Whether a
century hence they shall be regarded as visionaries or as men who gave
a new life to mankind, depends upon us.
For let us not disguise it -- republican government is yet but an
experiment. That it has worked well so far, determines nothing. That
republican institutions would work well under the social conditions of
the youth of the Republic -- cheap land, high wages and little
distinction between rich and poor-there was never any doubt, for they
were working well before. Our Revolution was not a revolution in the
full sense of the term, as was that great outburst of the spirit of
freedom that followed it in France. The colonies but separated from
Great Britain, and became an independent nation without essential
change in the institutions under which they had grown up. The doubt
about republican institutions is as to whether they will work when
population becomes dense, wages low, and a great gulf separates rich
and poor.
Can we speak of it as a doubt? Nothing in political philosophy can be
clearer than that under such conditions republican government must
break down.
This is not to say that these forms must be abandoned. We might and
probably would go on holding our elections for years and years after
our government had become essentially despotic. It was centuries after
Caesar ere the absolute master of the Roman world pretended to rule
other than by authority of a Senate that trembled before him. It was
not till the thirteenth century that English kings dropped the formal
claim of what was once the essence of their title -- the choice of the
people; and to this day the coronation ceremonies of European monarchs
retain traces of the free election of their leader by equal warriors.
But forms are nothing when substance has gone. And our forms are
those from which the substance may most easily go. Extremes meet, and
a republican government, based on universal suffrage and theoretical
equality, is of all governments that which may most easily become a
despotism of the worst kind. For there, despotism advances in the name
of the people. The single source of power once secured, everything is
secured. There is no unfranchised class to whom appeal may be made; no
privileged orders, who in defending their own rights may defend those
of all. No bulwark remains to stay the flood, no eminence to rise
above it.
And where there is universal suffrage, just as the disparity of
condition increases, so does it become easy to seize the source of
power, for the greater is the proportion of power in the hands of
those who feel no direct interest in the conduct of the government,
nay, who, made bitter by hardships, may even look upon profligate
government with the sort of satisfaction we may imagine the
proletarians and slaves of Rome to have felt as they saw a Caligula or
Nero raging among the rich patricians.
Given a community with republican institutions, in which one class is
too rich to be shorn of their luxuries, no matter how public affairs
are administered, and another so poor that any little share of the
public plunder, even though it be but a few dollars on election day,
will seem more than any abstract consideration, and power must pass
into the hands of jobbers who will sell it, as the praetorian legions
sold the Roman purple, while the people will be forced to reimburse
the purchase money with costs and profits. If to the pecuniary
temptation involved in the ordinary conduct of government are added
those that come from the granting of subsidies, the disposition of
public lands and the regulation of prices by means of a protective
tariff, the process will be the swifter.
Even the accidents of hereditary succession or of selection by lot
(the plan of some of the ancient republics) may sometimes place the
wise and just in power, but in a corrupt republic the tendency is
always to give power to the worst. Honesty and patriotism are weighted
and un- scrupulousness commands success. The best gravitate to the
bottom, the worst float to the top; and the vile can only be ousted by
the viler. And as a corrupt government always tends to make the rich
richer and the poor poorer, the fundamental cause of corruption is
steadily aggravated, while as national character must gradually
assimilate to the qualities that command power and consequently
respect, that demoralisation of opinion goes on which in the long
panorama of history we may see over and over again, transmuting races
of freemen into races of slaves.
As in England, in the last century, where Parliament was but a close
corporation of the aristocracy, a corrupt oligarchy, where it is
clearly fenced off from the masses, may exist without much effect on
national character; be cause, in that case, power is associated in the
popular mind with other things than corruption; but where there are no
hereditary distinctions, and men are habitually seen to raise
themselves by corrupt qualities from the lowest places to wealth and
power, tolerance of these qualities finally becomes admiration. A
corrupt democratic government must finally corrupt the people, and
when a people become corrupt, there is no resurrection. The life has
gone, only the carcass remains; and it is left but for the
ploughshares of fate to bury it out of sight.
Secure in her strength and position from external dangers, with the
cause gone that threatened her unity, the Republic begins to count the
years of her second century with a future, to all outward seeming,
secure. But may we not see already closing round her the insidious
perils from which, since her birth, destruction has been predicted ?
Clearly, to him who will look, are we passing from the conditions
under which republican government is easy, into those under which it
becomes endangered, if not dangerous. While the possessor of a single
million is ceasing to be noticeable in the throng of millionaires, and
larger private fortunes are mounting towards hundreds of mil lions, we
are all over the country becoming familiar with widespread poverty in
its hardest aspects -- not the poverty that nourishes the rugged
virtues, but poverty of the kind that dispirits and embrutes.
And as we see the gulf widening between rich and poor, may we not as
plainly see the symptoms of political deterioration that in a
republican government must always accompany it? Social distinctions
are sharpest in our great cities, and in our great cities is not
republican government becoming a reproach? May we not see in these
cities that the worst social influences are become the most potent
political factors; that corrupt rings notoriously rule; that offices
are virtually purchased -- and, most ominous of all, may we not
plainly see the growth of a sentiment that looks on all this as
natural, if not perfectly legitimate; that either doubts the existence
of an honest man in public place, or thinks of him as a fool too weak
to seize his opportunity? Has not the primary system, which is simply
republicanism applied to party management, already broken down in our
great cities, and are not parties in their despair already calling for
what in general government would be oligarchies and dictatorships?
We talk about the problem of municipal government! It is not the
problem of municipal government that we have to solve, but the problem
of republican government. These great cities are but the type of our
development. They are growing not merely with the growth of the
country, but faster than the growth of the country. There are children
here to-day who in all human probability will see San Francisco a city
as large as London, and will count through the country New Yorks by
the score!
Fellow-citizens, the wind does not blow north or south because the
weather-cocks turn that way. The complaints of political
demoralisation that come from every quarter are not because bad men
have been elected to office or corrupt men have taken to engineering
parties. If bad men are elected to office, if corrupt men rule
parties, is it not because the conditions are such as to give them the
advantage over good and pure men? Fellow-citizens, it is not the
glamour of success that makes the men whose work we celebrate to-day
loom up through the mists of a century like giants. They were
giants-some of them so great, that with all our eulogies we do not yet
appreciate them, and their full fame must wait for yet another
century. But the reason why such intellectual greatness gathered
around the cradle of the Republic and guided her early steps, was not
that men were greater in that day, but that the people chose their
best. You will hardly find a man of that time, of high character and
talent, who was not in some way in the public service. This certainly
cannot be said now. And it is because power is concentrating, as it
must concentrate as our institutions deteriorate. If one of those men
were to come back to-day and were spoken of for high position -- say
for the United States Senate -- instead of Jefferson's three
questions, the knowing ones would ask: "Has he money to make the
fight?" "Are the corporations for him?" "Can he
put up the primaries?" No less a man than Benjamin Franklin -- a
man whose fame as a statesman and philosopher is yet growing -- a man
whom the French Academy, the most splendid intellectual assemblage in
Europe, applauded as the modern Solon -- represented the city of
Philadelphia in the provincial Assembly for ten years, until, as their
best man, he was sent to defend the colony in London. Are there not
to-day cities in the land which even a Benjamin Franklin could not
represent in a State Assembly unless he put around his neck the collar
of a corporation or took ' his orders from a local ring?
You will think of many things in this connection to which it is not
necessary for me to allude. We all see them. Though we may not speak
it openly, the general faith in republican institutions is narrowing
and weakening -- it is no longer that defiant, jubilant, boastful
belief in republicanism as the source of all national blessings and
the cure for all human woes that it once was. We begin to realise that
corruption may cost as much as a royal family, and that the vaunted
ballot, under certain conditions, may bring forth ruling classes of
the worst kind, while we already see developing around us social evils
that we once associated only with effete monarchies. Can we talk so
proudly of welcoming the oppressed of all nations when thousands
vainly seek for work at the lowest wages? Can we expect him, who must
sup on charity, to rejoice that he cannot be taxed without being
represented; or congratulate him who seeks shelter in a station-house
that, as a citizen of the Republic, he is the peer of the monarchs of
earth?
Is there any tendency to improvement?
Fellow-citizens, we have hitherto had an advantage over older nations
which we can hardly overestimate. It has been our public domain, our
background of unfenced land, that made our social conditions better
than those of Europe; that relieved the labour market and maintained
wages; that kept open a door of escape from the increasing pressure in
older sections, and acting and reacting in many ways on our national
character, gave it freedom and independence, elasticity and hope. But
with a folly for which coming generations may curse us, we have wasted
it away. Worse than the Norman conqueror, we have repeated the sin of
the sin-swollen Henry VIII.; and already we hear in the "tramp"
of the sturdy vagrant of the sixteenth century, the predecessor of the
English pauper of this. We have done to the future the unutterable
wrong that English rule and English law did to Ireland, and already we
begin to hear of rack-rents and evictions. We have repeated the crime
that filled Italy with a servile population in place of the hardy
farmers who had carried her eagles to victory after victory -- the
crime that ate out the heart of the Mistress of the World, and buried
the glories of ancient civilisation in the dark ness of mediaeval
night. Instead of guarding the public domain as the most precious of
our heritages; instead of preserving it for our poorer classes of
to-day and for the uncounted millions who must follow us, we have made
it the reward of corruption, greed, fraud and perjury. Go out in this
fair land to-day and you may see great estates tilled by Chinamen,
while citizens of the Republic carry their blankets through dusty
roads begging for work; you may ride for miles and miles through
fertile land and see no sign of human life save the ghastly chimney of
an evicted settler or the miserable shanty of a poverty-stricken
renter. Cross the bay, and you will see the loveliest piece of
mountain scenery around this great city, though destitute of
habitation, walled in with a high board fence, that none but the owner
of 20,000 acres of land may look upon its beauties. Pass over these
broad acres which lie as they lay ere man was born on this earth, and
under penalty of fine and imprisonment you must confine yourself to
the road, purchased of him with poll taxes of four dollars a head
wrung from men packing their blankets in search of work at a dollar a
day.
Fellow-citizens, the public domain fit for homes is almost gone, and
at the rate we are parting with the rest, it is certain that by the
time children now in our public schools come of age, the pre-emption
law and the home stead law will remain on our statute books only to
remind them of their squandered birthright. Then the influences that
are at work to concentrate wealth in the hands of the few, and make
dependence the lot of the many, will have free play.
How potent are these influences! Though in form everything seems
tending to republican equality, a new power has entered the world
that, under present social adjustments, is working with irresistible
force to subject the many to the few. The tendency of all modern
machinery is to give capital an overpowering advantage and make labour
helpless. Our boys cannot learn trades, because there are few to
learn. The journeyman who, with his kit of tools, could make a living
anywhere, is being re placed by the operative who performs but one
part of a process, and must work with tools he can never hope to own,
and who consequently must take but a bare living, while all the
enormous increase of wealth which results from the economy of
production must go to increase great for tunes. The undercurrents of
the times seem to sweep us back again to the old conditions from which
we dreamed we had escaped. The development of the artisan and
commercial classes gradually broke down feudalism after it had become
so complete that men thought of heaven as organised on a feudal basis,
and ranked the first and second persons of the Trinity as Suzerain and
Tenant-in- Chief. But now the development of manufacture and ex change
has reached a point which threatens to compel every worker to seek a
master, as the insecurity which followed the final break up of the
Roman Empire compelled every freeman to seek a lord. Nothing seems
exempt from this tendency. Even errands are run by a corporation, and
one company carries carpet-sacks, while another drives the hack. It is
the old guilds of the middle ages over again, only that instead of all
being equal, one is master and the others serve. And where one is
master and the others serve, the one will control the others, even in
such matters as votes.
In our constitution is a clause prohibiting the granting of titles of
nobility. In the light of the present it seems a good deal like the
device of the man who, leaving a big hole for the cat, sought to keep
the kitten out by blocking up the little hole. Could titles add
anything to the power of the aristocracy that is here growing up ? Six
hundred liveried retainers followed the great Earl of Warwick to
Parliament; but in this young State there is already a simple citizen
who could discharge any one of thousands of men from their employment,
who controls 2200 miles of railroad and telegraph, and millions of
acres of land, and has the power of levying toll on traffic and travel
over an area twice that of the original thirteen States. Warwick was a
king-maker. Would it add to the real power of our simple citizen were
we to dub him an earl ?
Look at the social conditions which are growing up here in
California. Land monopolised; water monopolised; a race of cheap
workers crowding in, whose effect upon our own labouring classes is
precisely that of slavery; all the avenues of trade and travel under
one control, all wealth and power tending more and more to concentrate
in a few hands. What sort of a republic will this be in a few years
longer if these things go on? The idea would be ridiculous, were it
not too sad.
Fellow-citizens, I am talking of things not men. Most irrational
would be any enmity towards individuals. How few are there of us who
under similar circumstances would not do just what those we speak of
as monopolists have done. To put a saddle on our back is to invite the
booted and spurred to ride. It is not men who are to blame but the
system. And who is to blame for the system, but the whole people ? If
the lion will suffer his teeth to be pulled and his claws to be pared,
he must expect every cur to tease him.
But, fellow-citizens, while it is true that a republican government
worth the name cannot exist under the social conditions into which we
are passing, it is also true that under a really republican government
such conditions could not be.
I do not mean to say we have not had enough government; I mean to say
that we have had too much. It is a truth that cannot be too clearly
kept in mind that the best government is that which governs least, and
that the more a republican government undertakes to do, the less
republican it becomes. Unhealthy social conditions are but the result
of interferences with natural rights.
There is nothing in the condition of things (it were a libel on the
Creator to say so) which condemns one class to toil and want while
another lives in wasteful luxury. There is enough and to spare for us
all. But if one is permitted to ignore the rights of others by taking
more than his share, the others must get less; a difference is created
which constantly tends to become greater, and a greedy scramble ensues
in which more is wasted than is used.
If you will trace out the laws of the production of wealth and see
how enormous are the forces now wasted, if you will follow the laws of
its distribution, and see how, by human laws, one set of men are
enabled to appropriate a greater or less part of the earnings of the
others; if you will think how this robbery of labour degrades the
labourer and makes him unable to drive a fair bargain, and how it
diminishes production, you will begin to see that there is no
necessity for poverty, and that the growing disparity of social
conditions proceeds from laws which deny the equal rights of men.
Fellow-citizens, we have just listened again to the Declaration, not
merely of national independence, but of the rights of man.
Great was Magna Charta -- a beacon of light through centuries of
darkness, a bulwark of the oppressed through ages of wrong, a firm
rock for Liberty's feet, as she still strove onward!
But all charters and bills of right, all muniments and titles of
Liberty, are included in that simple statement of self-evident truth
that is the heart and soul of the Declaration: "That all men are
created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain
inalienable rights; that among them are life, liberty and the pursuit
of happiness."
In these simple words breathes not only the spirit of Magna Charta,
but the spirit which seeks its inspiration in the eternal facts of
nature -- through them speak not only Stephen Langton and John
Hampton, but Wat Tyler and the Mad Priest of Kent.
The assertion of the equal rights of all men to life, liberty and the
pursuit of happiness is the assertion of the right of each to the
fullest, freest exercise of all his faculties, limited only by the
equal right of every other. It includes freedom of person and security
of earnings, freedom of trade and capital, freedom of conscience and
speech and the press. It is the declaration of the same equal rights
of all human beings to the enjoyment of the bounty of the Creator --
to light and to air, to water and to land. It asserts these rights as
inalienable -- as the direct grant of the Creator to each human being,
of which he can be rightfully deprived neither by kings nor
congresses, neither by parchments nor prescriptions -- neither by the
compacts of past generations nor by majority votes.
This simple yet all-embracing statement bears the stamp royal of
primary truth -- it includes all partial truths and co-ordinates with
all other truths. This perfect liberty, which, by giving each his
rights, secures the rights of all -- is order, for violence is the
infringement of right; it is justice, for injustice is the denial of
right; it is equality, for one cannot have more than his right,
without another having less. It is reverence towards God, for
irreverence is the denial of His order; it is love towards man, for it
accords to others all that we ask for ourselves. It is the message
that the angels sang over Bethlehem in Judea -- it is the political
expression of the Golden Rule!
Like all men who build on truth, the men of the Revolution builded
better than they knew. The Declaration of Independence was ahead of
their time; it is in advance of our time; it means more than perhaps
even he saw whose pen traced it-man of the future that he was and
still is! But it has in it the generative power of truth; it has grown
and still must grow.
They tore from the draft of the Declaration the page in which
Jefferson branded the execrable crime of slavery. But in vain! In
those all-embracing words that page was still there, and though it has
taken a century, they are, in this respect, vindicated at last, and
human flesh and blood can no longer be bought and sold.
It is for us to vindicate them further. Slavery is not dead, though
its grossest form be gone. What is the difference, whether my body is
legally held by another, or whether he legally holds that by which
alone I can live. Hunger is as cruel as the lash. The essence of
slavery consists in taking from a man all the fruits of his labour
except a bare living, and of how many thousands miscalled free is this
the lot? Where wealth most abounds there are classes with whom the
average plantation negro would have lost in comfort by exchanging.
English villeins of the fourteenth century were better off than
English agricultural labourers of the nineteenth. There is slavery and
slavery! "The widow," says Carlyle, "is gathering
nettles for her children's dinner; a perfumed seigneur, delicately
lounging in the Ceil de Boeuf, has an alchemy whereby he will extract
from her the third nettle, and call it rent!"
Fellow-citizens, let us not be deluded by names. What is the use of a
republic if labour must stand with its hat off begging for leave to
work, if "tramps" must throng the highways and children grow
up in squalid tenement houses ? Political institutions are but means
to an end -- the freedom and happiness of the individual; and just so
far as they fail in that, call them what you will, they are condemned.
Our conditions are changing. The laws which impel nations to seek a
larger measure of liberty, or else take from them what they have, are
working silently but with irresistible force. If we would perpetuate
the Republic, we must come up to the spirit of the Declaration, and
fully recognise the equal rights of all men. We must free labour from
its burdens and trade from its fetters; we must cease to make
government an excuse for enriching the few at the expense of the many,
and confine it to necessary functions. We must cease to permit the
monopolisation of land and water by non-users, and apply the just
rule, "No seat reserved unless occupied." We must cease the
cruel wrong which, by first denying their natural rights, reduces
labourers to the wages of competition, and then, under pretence of
asserting the rights of another race, compels them to a competition
that will not merely force them to a standard of comfort unworthy the
citizen of a free republic, but ultimately deprives them of their
equal right to live.
Here is the test: whatever conduces to their equal and inalienable
rights to men is good -- let us preserve it.
Whatever denies or interferes with those equal rights is bad-let us
sweep it away. If we thus make our institutions consistent with their
theory, all difficulties must vanish. We will not merely have a
republic, but social conditions consistent with a republic. If we will
not do this, we surrender the Republic, either to be torn by the
volcanic forces that already shake the ground beneath the standing
armies of Europe, or to rot by slow degrees, and in its turn undergo
the fate of all its predecessors.
Liberty is not a new invention that, once secured, can never be lost.
Freedom is the natural state of man. "Who is your lord?"
shouted the envoys of Charles the Simple to the Northmen who had
penetrated into the heart of France. "We have no lord; we are all
free men!" was their answer; and so in their time of vigour would
have answered every people that ever made a figure in the world. But
at some point in the development of every people freedom has been
lost, because as fresh gains were made, or new forces developed, they
were turned to the advantage of a few.
Wealth in itself is a good, not an evil; but wealth concentrated in
the hands of a few, corrupts on one side, and degrades on the other.
No chain is stronger than its weakest link, and the ultimate condition
of any people must be the condition of its lowest class. If the low
are not brought up, the high must be brought down. In the long run, no
nation can be freer than its most oppressed, richer than its poorest,
wiser than its most ignorant. This is the fiat of the eternal justice
that rules the world. It stands forth on every page of history. It is
what the Sphinx says to us as she sitteth in desert sand, while the
winged bulls of Mneveh bear her witness! It is written in the
undecipherable hieroglyphics of Yucatan; in the brick mounds of
Babylon; in the prostrate columns of Persiopolis; in the salt-sown
plain of Carthage. It speaks to us from the shattered relics of
Grecian art; from the mighty ruins of the Coliseum! Down through the
centuries comes a warning voice from the great Republic of the ancient
world to the great Republic of the new. In three Latin words Pliny
sums up the genesis of the causes that ate out the heart of the
mightiest power that the world ever saw, and overwhelmed a widespread
civilisation: "Great estates ruined Italy !"
Let us heed the warning by laying the foundations of the Republic
upon the work of the equal, inalienable rights of all. So shall
dangers disappear, and forces that now threaten turn to work our
bidding; so shall wealth in crease, and knowledge grow, and vice, and
crime and misery vanish away.
They who look upon Liberty as having accomplished her mission, when
she has abolished hereditary privileges and given men the ballot, who
think of her as having no further relations to the every-day affairs
of life, have not seen her real grandeur -- to them the poets who have
sung of her must seem rhapsodists, and her martyrs fools! As the sun
is the lord of life, as well as of light; as his beams not merely
pierce the clouds, but support all growth, supply all motion, and call
forth from what would otherwise be a cold and inert mass, all the
infinite diversities of being and beauty, so is liberty to mankind. It
is not for an abstraction that men have toiled and died; that in every
age the witnesses of liberty have stood forth, and the martyrs of
liberty have suffered. It was for more than this that matrons handed
the Queen Anne musket from its rest, and that maids bid their lovers
go to death!
We speak of liberty as one thing, and of virtue, wealth, knowledge,
invention, national strength and national independence as other
things. But, of all these, Liberty is the source, the mother, the
necessary condition. She is to virtue what light is to colour, to
wealth what sunshine is to grain; to knowledge what eyes are to the
sight. She is the genius of invention, the brawn of national strength,
the spirit of national independence! Where Liberty rises, there virtue
grows, wealth increases, knowledge expands, invention multiplies human
powers, and in strength and spirit the freer nation rises among her
neighbours as Saul amid his brethren -- taller and fairer. Where
Liberty sinks, there virtue fades, wealth diminishes, knowledge is
forgotten, invention ceases, and empires once mighty in arms and arts
become a helpless prey to freer barbarians!
Only in broken gleams and partial light has the sun of Liberty yet
beamed among men, yet all progress hath she called forth.
Liberty came to a race of slaves crouching under Egyptian whips, and
led them forth from the House of Bondage. She hardened them in the
desert and made of them a race of conquerors. The free spirit of the
Mosaic law took their thinkers up to heights where they beheld the
unity of God, and inspired their poets with strains that yet phrase
the highest exaltations of thought. Liberty dawned on the Phenician
coast, and ships passed the Pillars of Hercules to plough the unknown
sea. She broke in partial light on Greece, and marble grew to shapes
of ideal beauty, words became the instruments of subtlest thought, and
against the scanty militia of free cities the countless hosts of the
Great King broke like surges against a rock. She cast her beams on the
four-acre farms of Italian husbandmen, and born of her strength a
power came forth that conquered the world! She glinted from shields of
German warriors, and Augustus wept his legions. Out of the night that
followed her eclipse, her slanting rays fell again on free cities, and
a lost learning revived, modern civilisation began, a new world was
unveiled; and as Liberty grew so grew art, wealth, power, knowledge
and refinement. In the history of every nation we may read the same
truth. It was the strength born of Magna Charta that won Crecy and
Agincourt. It was the revival of Liberty- from the despotism of the
Tudors that glorified the Elizabethan age. It was the spirit that
brought a crowned tyrant to the block that planted here the seed of a
mighty tree. It was the energy of ancient freedom that, the moment it
had gained unity, made Spain the mightiest power of the world, only to
fall to the lowest depth of weakness when tyranny succeeded liberty.
See, in France, all intellectual vigour dying under the tyranny of the
seventeenth century to revive in splendour as Liberty awoke in the
eighteenth, and on the enfranchisement of the French peasants in the
great revolution, basing the wonderful strength that has in our time
laughed at disaster.
What Liberty shall do for the nation that fully accepts and loyally
cherishes her, the wondrous inventions, which are the marked features
of this century, give us but a hint. Just as the condition of the
working classes is improved, do we gain in productive power. Wherever
labour is best paid and has most leisure, comfort, and refinement,
there invention is most active and most generally utilised.
Short-sighted are they who think the reduction of working hours would
reduce the production of wealth. Human muscles are one of the tiniest
of forces; but for the human mind the resistless powers of nature
work. To enfranchise labour, to give it leisure and comfort and
independence, is to substitute in production mind for muscle. When
this is fully done, the power that we now exert over matter will be as
nothing to that we shall have.
It has been said that, from the very increase of our numbers, the
American Union must in time necessarily break up. I do not believe it.
Even now, while the memories of a civil war are fresh, I do not think
any part of our people regret that this continent is not bisected by
an imaginary line, separating two jealous nations, two great standing
armies. If we respect the equal rights of all, if we reduce the
operation of our national Government to the purposes for which it is
alone fitted, the preservation of the common peace, the maintenance of
the common security and the promotion of the common convenience, there
can be no sectional interest adverse to unity, and the blessings of
the bond that makes us a nation must be come more apparent as years
roll on.
So far from this Union necessarily falling to pieces from its own
weight, it may, if we but hold fast to justice, not merely embrace a
continent, but prove in the future capable of a wider extension than
we have yet dreamed.
The crazy king, the brutal ministers, the rotten Parliament, the
combination of tyranny, folly, corruption and arrogance that sundered
the Anglo-Saxon race, is gone, but stronger and stronger grows the
influence of the death less minds that make our common language
classic. The republic of Anglo-Saxon literature extends wherever the
tongue of Shakespeare is spoken. The great actors who from time to
time walk this stage, find their audiences over half the globe; it is
to one people that our poets sing; it is one mind that responds to the
thought of our thinkers. The old bitternesses are passing away. With
us the hatreds, born of two wars, are beginning to soften and die out,
while Englishmen, who this year honour us in honouring the citizen
whom we have twice deemed worthy of our foremost place, are beginning
to look upon our Revolution as the vindication of their own liberties.
A hundred years have passed since the fast friend of American liberty
-- the great Earl Chatham -- rose to make his last appeal for the
preservation, on the basis of justice, of that English-speaking
empire, in which he saw the grandest possibility of the future. Is it
too soon to hope that the future may hold the realisation of his
vision in a nobler form than even he imagined, and that it may be the
mission of this Republic to unite all the nations of English speech,
whether they grow beneath the Northern Star or Southern Cross, in a
league which, by insuring justice, promoting peace, and liberating
commerce, will be the forerunner of a world-wide federation that will
make war the possibility of a past age, and turn to works of
usefulness the enormous forces now dedicated to destruction.
And she to whom on this day our hearts turn, our ancient ally, our
generous friend -- thank God we can say, our sister Republic of
France! It was not alone the cold calculations of kingcraft that when
our need was direst, helped us with money and supplies, with armies
and fleets. The grand idea of the equal rights of man was stirring in
France, her pulses were throbbing with the new life that was soon to
shake the thrones of Europe as with an earth quake, and French
sympathy went out where Liberty made her stand. "They are a
generous people," wrote Franklin, "they do not like to hear
of advantages in return for their aid. They desire the glory of
helping us." France has that glory, and more. Let her column
Vendome fall, and the memory of the butchers of mankind fade away; the
great things that France has done for freedom will make her honoured
of the nations, while, with increasing and increasing meaning, rings
through the ages the cry with which she turned to the thunder-burst of
Valmy: "Live the people!"
Beset by difficulties from which we are happily exempt -on the one
side those who dream of bringing back the middle ages, on the other
the red spectre; compelled, or in fancy compelled, by the legacy of
old hates to maintain that nightmare of prosperity and deadly foe of
freedom, a large standing army-France has yet steadily made progress.
Italy is one; the great Germanic race at last have unity; as out of a
trance, life stirs in Spain; Russia moves as she marches. May it not
be France's to again show Europe the way?
Fellow-citizens: If I have sought rather to appeal to thought than to
flatter vanity, it is not that I do not see the greatness and feel the
love of my country. Drawing my first breath almost within the shadow
of Independence Hall, the cherished traditions of the Republic entwine
themselves with my earliest recollections, and her flag symbolises to
me all that I hold dear on earth. But for the very love I bear her,
for the very memories I cherish, I would not dare come before you on
this day and ignore the dangers I see in her path.
If I have not dwelt on her material greatness or pictured her future
growth, it is because there rises before me a higher ideal of what
this Republic may be than can be expressed in material symbols -- an
ideal so glorious that, beside it, all that we now pride ourselves on
seems mean and pitiful. That ideal is not satisfied with a republic
where, with all the enormous gains in productive power, labour is
ground down to a bare living and must think the chance to work a
favour; it is not satisfied with a republic where prisons are crowded
and almshouses are built and families are housed in tiers. It is not
satisfied with a republic where one tenant for a day can warn his co-
tenants off more of the surface of this rolling sphere than he is
using or can use, or compel them to pay him for the bounty of their
common Creator; it is not satisfied with a republic where the fear of
poverty on the one hand and the sight of great wealth on the other
makes the lives of so many such a pitiful straining, keeps eyes to the
ground that might be turned to the stars, and substitutes the worship
of the Golden Calf for that of the Living God!
It hopes for a republic where all shall have plenty, where each may
sit under his vine and fig tree, with none to vex him or make him
afraid; where with want shall gradually disappear vice and crime;
where men shall cease to spend their lives in a struggle to live, or
in heaping up things they cannot take away; where talent shall be
greater than wealth and character greater than talent, and where each
may find free scope to develop body, mind and soul.
Is this the dream of dreamers? One brought to the world the message
that it might be reality. But they crucified him between two thieves.
Not till it accepts that message can the world have peace. Look over
the history of the past. What is it but a record of the woes inflicted
by man on man, of wrong producing wrong, and crime fresh crime? It
must be so till justice is acknowledged and liberty is law.
Some things have we done, but not all. In the words with which an
eminent Frenchman closes the history of that great revolution that
followed ours: "Liberty is not yet here; but she will come!"
Fellow-citizens, let us follow the star that rose above the cradle of
the Republic; let us try our laws by the test of the Declaration. Let
us show to the nations our faith in Liberty, nor fear she will lead us
astray.
Who is Liberty that we should doubt her; that we should set bounds to
her, and say, "Thus far shall thou come and no further!" Is
she not peace? Is she not prosperity? Is she not progress? Nay, is she
not the goal to wards which all progress strives?
Not here; but yet she cometh! Saints have seen her in their visions;
seers have seen her in their trance. To heroes has she spoken, and
their hearts were strong; to martyrs and the flames were cool!
She is not here, but yet she cometh. Lo! her feet are on the
mountains -- the call of her clarions ring on every breeze; the
banners of her dawning fret the sky! Who will hear her as she calleth;
who will bid her come and welcome? Who will turn to her? who will
speak for her? who will stand for her while she yet hath need?
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